Harmonious Brand Design

Harmonious Conference

Harmonious is a brand created for a senior level design course at SPU that seeks to unite communities together through experience design. Harmonious looks to the stars for inspiration. The sun, moon, earth, and everything else has to be in harmony for us to exist. Harmonious’ brand is best described by a quote by Matthew R. Francis,

“Low-mass black holes ‘sing’ in harmony with themselves, through flashes of light instead of sound.”

Logo Process

My process for designing a logo consisted to find a word that seemed familiar with first time readers, that also represented the core ideas of my brand. I felt as though this, paired with a logo that was somewhat unique and wasn’t too “on the nose” would create a unique and exciting brand identity. I started with naming, and ended up with these results.

When the name “Harmonious” was finally chosen, I went on to sketch out logo ideas to feel-out what I wanted the brand to represent. Here are my preliminary sketches.

My sketches eventually were boiled down into these three rough logos. I wanted each of them to seem like something you would see in a space station, or on the monitor of an 80’s sci-fi movie.

From feedback from my peers, I realized that all of these rough’s were way to detailed, and almost seemed like a metal band’s logo, and not quite the mysterious cosmos vibe that I was trying to foster. I ended up with this final logo. Here it is in all of it’s iterations.

Deliverables

From here on I was tasked with creating a poster and brochure that were similar to one another. I wanted to create a poster that captured that sci-fi influence I had from the beginning, and stick to a brochure that was more familiar to what people were used to seeing. I figured this pairing would be helpful when discussing a experience design, which can be some-what esoteric.

Promo Video

In a later motion design class, I was tasked with creating a promotional video for my brand using “analog effects”. These effects were required to be created out of the After Effects engine, and to be filmed by hand. Utilizing vegetable oil, glow-sticks, and food coloring, I created an interesting spacial effect in pitch darkness.

Harmonious Experience Design Project

Additionally, Anomaly was created to be an exhibit within Harmonious. Anomaly is an exhibit created with the goal to teach users about way-finding as well as building an experience. Anomaly does this via letting users create walls with light. By drawing on screens inside the exhibit, users can bend light at will to solve problems prompted by their screens. Experiencing Anomaly with different amounts of people changes your experience as well. With a party, Anomaly changes the way you create. Guiding your members to a specific location, or creating around someone. Furthermore, Anomaly is designed to make one feel like they are in space. The large walls and the lack of color give off the feeling of being small and somewhat insignificant.

Some screen shots of a model of Anomaly are here, as well as some of the screens featured on the control panels.

Sketchup Models:

Screens:

Promotional Material

Outcome

Harmonious in it’s entirety is a project that I have put the most time into creating. Through inception to eventual experience design, I spent hundreds of hours creating the full Harmonious Package. I believe that I succeeded in many areas, but missed the mark in many areas as well. My professors and classmates found my logo to be effective, however only by it’s self. When text was added to it, many found it much weaker of a design. The deliverables utilized a pattern that I found to be very interesting and effective, however when creating my promotional video I do not think that the dots translated well into real-life effects. Finally, I think that my exhibit design was the most successful part of Harmonious. Anomaly, although being confusing initially, was good to have separate from Harmonious. I found that Anomaly was able to evolve from what I originally conceptualized, to what it’s final iteration was. My professors and colleagues found Anomaly to be an effective exhibit, besides it being extremely ambitious and some-what “meta”.